ENWorld’s Hot Roleplaying Games – September 2015

It’s the start of a month and the start of GenCon, so this is an interesting time to check in on ENWorld’s list of hot RPGs. The last month saw GenCon and a number of other major conventions happening, so it’ll be particularly interesting to see how the buzz from that affects the charts this time.

Usual reminder applies: RPGs are scored on the chart based on what’s being actively discussed on as wide a pool of internet fora and blogs as ENWorld can find RSS feeds for. It isn’t tracking sales, and it isn’t even tracking popularity (because conceivably a game could get onto the chart if there were a sufficiently virulent negative reaction to it). What I present here are the scores assigned to each game, not the percentages (which can tend to obscure whether there’s been a recent explosion of RPG discussion – for example, as associated with the D&D 5E release – or whether things are comparatively quiet on the RPG talkosphere).

What’s evident here is that most but not all games have seen a drop in their score – some a sharp drop. I have to wonder whether some of the blogs and forums (or at least their associated RSS feeds) tracked by the chart have gone down in the last month or so, which might account for the scores dropping. What seems particularly notable is the total collapse in the score for FATE; since the chart tracks the last 90 days of discussion, I can’t see how such a sudden, sharp cutoff would be possible, unless the search terms used to detect mentions of FATE have been tweaked to be so narrow as to miss almost all the conversations. Though it’s remotely possible that the FATE bubble has just plain burst, I haven’t seen enough of a tail-off in FATE discussion to really make me think that was likely.

Still, some games did manage to buck the trend – Feng Shui continues to ride the wave of its 2nd edition, whereas Warhammer 40,000 has shored up its position nicely for a setting where most of the RPG lines seem to be on life support as Fantasy Flight Games shift focus to milking their Star Wars RPG licence for all it’s worth. The big winners, though, have to be Onyx Path, with the World of Darkness standing as the most discussed RPG which isn’t some sort of D&D variant (and only 5E and Pathfinder, the two largest D&D variants, ranking ahead of it) for the first time since I started tracking these figures. The continued good reaction to the second editions of many of the New World of Darkness core books and the PDF releases of the 20th Anniversary Editions of Mage: the Awakening and Vampire: the Dark Ages have all buoyed the World of Darkness balloon in the last few months, and the announcement at Gen Con that Vampire: the Masquerade will get an all-new 4th Edition might well have helped them retain their score whilst D&D 3.X slid down past them and FATE tumbled down the chart. Still, with that FATE result looking highly anomalous, we’ll have to wait and see whether this state of affairs lasts.